


Six Impossible Things

by Mad_Maudlin



Series: However Improbable [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Vampires, Werewolves, h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-17
Updated: 2010-09-17
Packaged: 2017-10-11 22:14:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/117673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Maudlin/pseuds/Mad_Maudlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mornings after are always awkward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Six Impossible Things

1.  
John washed up on a wave of pain, catching hold of consciousness for a moment—of damp grass under him; of blood in his mouth and something not quite blood; inexplicably, of warmth. He took a deep breath, smelling _London_ and _green_ and _blood_ and _Sherlock,_ and when he wrenched his eyes open he found himself draped in that long black coat, scant protection from immodesty and the pre-dawn chill.

He had not expected this. He wasn't sure what he _had_ expected. Not this.

He heard footsteps, saw Sherlock approaching him from across a well-kept lawn. His shirt and trousers were filthy and rent to rags, and he carried his jacket over one shoulder; in the other hand he carried a plastic shopping bag. They made eye contact, and John saw the moment Sherlock lengthened his stride, hurrying toward him, nearly breaking into a run.

Stupid from pain and exhaustion, he tried to move, though he couldn't have said whether it was towards Sherlock or away; then stars burst in his eyes, and after that, darkness.

2.  
He swam up from a medication haze back in the flat, on the couch. He could tell without opening his eyes that he was naked under one of Mrs. Hudson's quilts, and that Sherlock was sitting in the opposite chair, plucking listlessly at his violin without actually playing anything. Watching over him. Waiting.

The plucking stopped almost instantly, though. Sherlock declared quietly, "It's half-one."

Which was exactly what John had been wondering, of course. He opened his eyes to dimness, angles of sunlight filtering through drawn curtains. He tried turning towards Sherlock, but the world wobbled upsettingly and his stomach lurched. "Basin," he blurted.

Surprisingly, Sherlock had one to hand, and didn't seem to mind holding it while John was thoroughly sick. There wasn't much in his stomach—blood and bile and water, and something that appeared to be a shirt button. "So that's where that went," Sherlock said, looking into the bowl while John sagged back onto the couch, clutching what felt like a cracked rib. "Hmm. You know, there are other painkillers that don't cause such severe nausea. Never mind that oxycodone has a worryingly high risk of dependency."

Oxycodone also limited John's response to, "Huh?"

Sherlock set the basin aside and reached for the end table, the one nearest John's head. He presented John with a clean washcloth and a familiar prescription bottle. "Don't you remember telling me about your 'supplies'?" Sherlock asked, now sounding outright concerned. "In the cab?"

John wiped his mouth and spit into the cloth. "Don't remember any cab," he admitted. As he passed the cloth back, the edge of the quilt caught on a long row of steri-strips up his forearm, holding together a shallow laceration. Probably from one of the windows they'd gone crashing through, or possibly from Sherlock's teeth; after a while it all sort of ran together.

Sherlock sat on his heels and stared at John for a moment, an unfamiliar little frown dragging his face down. "I'm sorry," he said abruptly. "If I'd had any idea you were so fragile, I'd have been more careful."

John shut his eyes, not sure what was confusing him the most: the drugs, the apology, or being called _fragile._ "More careful about what, exactly?" he asked muddily.

Sherlock now looked outright alarmed. "You _do_ remember yesterday night and evening?"

"Of course I do," John snapped. Sometimes he thought it'd be easier if he didn't; sometimes he envied the fellows in the films who never knew what they'd been up, who had the luxury of denial. For him the whole thing was burned into his memories, distorted but detailed. They had argued, and then he had changed, and then...

Then he and Sherlock had fought, and London had been their arena.

"Then you understand," Sherlock said, relaxing.

John wasn't sure he understood anything at the moment. "How many tablets did you give me?" he asked, rubbing at his gritty eyes.

"Three, as per your instructions," Sherlock said. "Hence my concern about dependency, entirely hypocritical though it may be, seeing as you do have a family history of addictive behavior."

John didn't know how he was meant to respond to that; he shifted as best he could against the pillow and then shut his eyes. "I'm going back to sleep."

"Probably for the best," Sherlock said, and John slipped away again to the sound of that tuneless plucking.

3.  
When he awoke again, Sherlock was gone. The drugs were beginning to wear off, but the pain was manageable; John sat up and stretched gingerly, and when the world didn't spin away from him, tried to stand. The cracked rib no longer felt quite so cracked, and he thought he had enough energy to get to the bathroom.

A shower was right out of the question, of course. He looked like a rail map from all the lines of steri-strips holding his skin together—at least fifty percent more than were actually necessary, and placed with a mathematical accuracy that bordered on obsessive-compulsive. Still, he washed up as best he could with a damp washcloth, and brushed his teeth fiercely until he'd erased the taste of bile and blood (and "blood," Sherlock's, almost but not quite human). He changed some of the other bandages, the ones that covered abrasions and punctures, and applied more antibiotic ointment; there was nothing to be done about the bruises, though, that bloomed black and purple over every other inch of him, fading around the edges to yellow and green.

In another day or two, he knew, he'd be recovered—sporting a few new scars to overlay the old ones, but no worse for wear, at least until this time next month. He supposed, compared to Sherlock, that qualified as _fragile,_ but just barely.

He dragged himself up to his room for pajamas, but by the time he'd wrestled them on he wasn't sure he had the energy to go back downstairs. That was when he noticed the other prescription bottle sitting on his nightstand. The note underneath was in the angular printing Sherlock used when he was actually making an effort to be legible: _Co-codamol also habit forming. Basin under bed._

John took just one and lay down on top of his duvet. He wasn't planning to sleep, just close his eyes and catch his breath...

4.  
This particular level of racket in the kitchen usually signaled disaster. John shook the sleep out of his brain and checked the bedside clock—he's dozed off nearly half an hour.

At the bottom of the stairs he found Sherlock knocking about the kitchen, yes—with grocery bags. "Is that where you've been?" John asked, bracing himself against the door frame.

Sherlock glanced at him. "You only took the one tablet, excellent."

John rubbed his eyes. "Sherlock, answer the question."

"Considering you haven't eaten anything of substance since yesterday tea and there was nothing to hand but a bottle of whiskey and a diseased liver, I thought it prudent," Sherlock declared airily. He seemed to have bought enough food for a regiment, a random assortment of tins and packets with the odd fresh vegetable thrown in for color. John wondered how long it had been since he had done this, bought food with the intention of somebody eating it.

That only made him wonder when Sherlock had last hit up Bart's blood bank, though, and that sent him back into the sitting room to stretch out on the couch.

There were a few more banging noises, and then Sherlock followed him. "You're not going to vomit again, are you?"

"No," John said stiffly, folding his arms across his chest.

From this angle Sherlock was mostly silhouette, backlit from the kitchen. He cocked his head, and John knew he was being dissected, deduced at, judged. "You don't remember the cab at all," Sherlock said softly.

"I already told you I don't," John snapped, wondering what the hell that had to do with anything.

"Do you remember anything after you...reverted?"

What a choice of words. He wondered if this was Sherlock's idea of tact. "I woke up in a park," John said. "You'd gone shopping. Then I passed out again."

"It was a golf course," Sherlock corrected. "Seventh hole, to be precise. And I'd gone to acquire us both some clothing that would not arouse the suspicions of the cab driver, or in your case, result in charges of indecent exposure."

John noted the _acquire_ rather than _buy,_ and wondered if some innocent family had lost things off the clothesline. "Well, that's all I remember until I woke up back here."

Sherlock sighed. "So we're going to have to repeat the whole tedious conversation, are we?"

"It might be helpful now that I'm fully conscious, yes," John said.

Sherlock nodded once, glanced at the skull like it had offered an inaudible suggestion, nodded again. Then he crossed the room to where John lay and knelt in front of him, taking one of John's hands in both of his. "Allow me to summarize: I will not kill you. I have no intention of harming you in any deliberate way. I have no designs on any of your bodily fluids, nor your arteries carotid, radial or femoral, nor any of your various veins. I give you my word on that, for whatever it may be worth to you, which I realize may not be a great deal considering that you met me on the stairs with a gun twenty-four hours ago, but it's all I have to offer."

John pulled his hand free, but found it hard to maintain a scowl. Something about the whole gesture was strangely formal, and strangely intimate; this close John was buffeted by the smell of Sherlock, crisp and dry and not quite human. But that smell was also intimately tied up in how John thought of _home_ these days, and despite the sarcasm Sherlock actually seemed earnest, and...

...and he'd apologized for hurting him. Which was frankly ludicrous, as John had been trying his damnedest to hurt back, but of course, Sherlock wasn't the one who'd needed help getting home this morning. If he'd wanted John dead, he'd missed a golden opportunity.

John averted his eyes. "Erm. I wasn't really going to shoot you."

"Of course not," Sherlock said confidently. "In fact, I'm fairly confident the whole confrontation was the result of a subconscious desire to out yourself to me."

John winced at the choice of words, but when he looked back, Sherlock was smiling a little bit. Teasing him. "You already knew, though," he said.

"I suspected, based on the available evidence," Sherlock corrected. "Short of seeding the house with costume jewelry, I could think of no subtle way to verify it."

"And when have you ever cared about being subtle?" John asked.

That made Sherlock laugh as he stood. "Stay there," he declared. "I intend to cook."

John wondered if that was a warning or a threat.

5.  
Sherlock made oatmeal, because that fell in the overlap between "things that John would not throw up" and "things that Sherlock could not ruin." He insisted on serving it on a tray, with tea and biscuits. John considered the possibility that he'd given Sherlock some kind of brain injury.

Of course, while John ate, Sherlock pulled out his mobile and dialed a number. "Stop calling me," was the first thing he said when the call connected; John thought he recognized Lestrade on the other end, but he couldn't pick out the words. "Yes, of course, which is why I'm phoning you back now. Of _course_ I know, who do you think reported it to you lot? No, I am emphatically _not_ interested, which I thought I communicated quite clearly by _ignoring you._ Besides, the case is obvious; even _Anderson_ should be able to put the pieces together. Now go away." He hung up and flung himself down into John's chair with a groan.

"What case is this again?" John asked.

"Hmm? Oh, the idiot wants us to go investigate _ourselves,"_ Sherlock grumbled. "Apparently we caused rather a lot of property damage last night and someone's complained."

John almost choked on a biscuit. Of course he remembered it—crashing through windows, using cars as springboards, at one point he recalled Sherlock hitting him with a _bench_ —but somehow it hadn't occurred to him that they'd left a debris field in their wake. "Jesus Christ, Sherlock, what have we done?" he blurted.

Sherlock looked to his phone. "I believe Lestrade texted me the statistics..."

"No," John said. "I mean...last night...god, we could've killed somebody."

"But neither of us did," Sherlock said.

"Because we were too busy trying to kill each other."

"But we didn't," Sherlock said. "And nobody is killing anyone at the moment, unless you are planning to do something outrageously inventive with your spoon, so why are you fixating on it?"

John shut his eyes and took a deep breath. "We're dangerous, Sherlock. So dangerous."

"Of course we are," he said with an almost sensual relish. When John opened his eyes, Sherlock was smiling slightly, eyes half-lidded. "We are _predators,_ John. We both just happen to be very...selective about our prey."

John shook his head almost on reflex. "No. I'm not...that's not me. Maybe it's you, but not me."

For a minute it looked like Sherlock was going to argue, but for once he actually held his tongue. "As you say," he said, and snatched his laptop off the desk. John went back to choking down his oatmeal.

6.  
When John fell back asleep that night, he dreamed of racing through the streets of London, hot blood in his mouth, Sherlock before him or behind him or sometimes just beside him. It wasn't the first time he'd dreamed such a thing, but for the first time he wasn't sure if it was a nightmare.


End file.
